A few days back, there was news regarding Hansal Mehta’s celebrated web series ‘Scam 1992’ achieving the feat of being the highest rated Indian show on the coveted list of IMDb’s Top 250 television shows across the world.
However, if you visit the ‘Top Rated Shows’ menu on the IMDb portal, you will observe that ‘Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story’ is currently ranked at the 18th position on the list. It is equally pertinent that the IMDb user rating mentioned on the individual page of ‘Scam 1992’ is currently 9.5/10 and 1.11 lakh users have voted for the same.
Interestingly, the only other show that boasts a 9.5/10 rating is David Attenborough’s documentary miniseries ‘Planet Earth II’ for which a lesser number of 1.02 lakh users have voted.
The above fact boils down to the obvious question: Why is ‘Scam 1992’ ranked at No.18 on the ‘Top Rated Shows’ list despite its highest IMDb user rating of 9.5/10?
For an answer to the above question, we thought the best explanation can be given only by IMDb. So, we drafted a query regarding the same to which an IMDb representative had explained that:
“Only votes from regular IMDb voters are considered when creating the top 250 out of the full voting database. This explains any difference between the vote averages reported in the top 250 lists and those on the individual title pages. This also explains why movies or shows you might think from their averages out to appear on the list yet do not actually appear there.”
IMDb further stated that “To maintain the effectiveness of the top 250 lists, we deliberately do not disclose the criteria used for a person to be counted as a regular voter.”
So, from IMDb’s official reply, it may be deduced that in the case of ‘Scam 1992’, out of the 1.11 lakh voters, votes from only regular voters might have been considered to compile the ‘Top 250 TV Shows’ IMDb list.
IMDb’s reply also explains the reason why the show’s user rating on the ‘Top Rated TV Shows’ menu is 9.1/10 instead of 9.5/10 as displayed on the show’s individual IMDb page.
Because if that wasn’t the case, ‘Scam 1992’ would have certainly ranked as the World’s No.1 TV show on the ‘Top Rated TV Shows’ IMDb list. In that case, it would have been even ahead of celebrated shows like ‘Band of Brothers’, ‘Chernobyl’, and we dare say, ‘Breaking Bad’.
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